On 2/4, our friend survived being taken hostage outside her rental home, raped and robbed by 3 men. The media coverage (which she did not want -- we're trying to extract a silver lining from the fact that it went public) is here and here. Afterward, her face bleeding, she walked back into her home and told her terrified landlord "Don't touch me. I'm evidence."

She could have easily been killed, but she wasn't.

"Our first priority is to make sure #nolabadass will not go into debt as a result of what has happened," her friends wrote on the Indiegogo site. The fundraiser has exceeded its initial goal.

A 15-year-old boy has been arrested as a suspect in the gang-rape, and has confessed to the crime. His family pressed him to turn himself in after seeing his photograph in news reports. Police have issued warrants for the arrest of two other suspects.

20 Responses to “Fundraising online to help a rape victim in New Orleans”

“Our first priority is to make sure #nolabadass will not go into debt as a result of what has happened.”
Seriously, what kind of fucked up world are we living in where this is a concern? (I know it is one, just… WTF.)

Oh, fantastic. Lots of comments at the news sites about how this woman “should have” had a gun, with an often stated, “Then maybe she wouldn’t have been raped”. Nice way to blame the victim while claiming you’re not.

Women SHOULD NOT have to carry around guns just to feel safe. And, what if a woman isn’t capable? What about the elderly? The disabled? Someone who is just not a violent person and who doesn’t want to carry around a gun? Or who doesn’t do well in such situations?

It’s an obvious truth but something about the way this idea is usually phrased bugs me. As if all dudes are consciously choosing not to rape people and rapists are just guys who won’t fall in line with that idea. It puts the line between rapists and normal guys as pretty thin… “just stop raping people guys” but… maybe there is truth in that, the line being thinner than I imagined, and that is what bugs me? I dunno, just talking it out here. I can’t imagine what it’s like to go through this as a woman. The closest I can come is to imagine it happening to someone I love and the idea brings me to tears as I even type this.

The line is thinner than you realize. Researchers have learned that simply phrasing the questions slightly differently is all it takes for an astonishing number of men to admit that they HAVE committed rape (you just can’t call it that).

I used to work with rape victims. One case in particular has some similarities with this one: it was a gang rape situation in which two of the guys turned themselves in after the fact. They were horrified at what they had done, and had no previous record of any wrongdoing. Basically, a mob gets started, and people get swept along into that mentality. High school and college are filled with opportunities for such a situation to arise.

It’s true. Women shouldn’t have to do anything special to be safe. I still wish they had a way to just press a zapper button and fry the rapist on the spot, though. Rapists need to be so disincentivized to do their evil that it’s a rare to nonexistent crime. As it is, these guys get away with way too much and need to be put down. It’s really sad. Rape is trivialized in the USA, just as much as in many other countries.

I am not completely against guns, at least in this reality, but that would be MY choice. I’d happily shoot someone dead if they tried to harm me — and if I was able, which is seriously not guaranteed So many people seem certain that a “good guy” with a gun will always be able to take down the bad guy. So unrealistic.

But this notion that anyone “should have” to carry a gun is just maddening.

I keep remembering that a gun is more likely to be used against you than you are to shoot the bad guy, so I’d really rather not arm my would-be attacker on top of my uncertainty as to whether I can shoot another human being in the face.

You may “remember that” but its more of an artifact of manipulable statistics. There is no evidence that, say, most times bad guys wrest the gun from your hand and use it before you can. There is more evidence that more people are killed by family members with household guns than use them for defense. But that’s true even if there are no guns involved. I’m more likely to be killed by my kitchen knife or baseball bat than use it to defend myself.

Yep. I want to force everyone who says that regular citizens should be armed to read the chapter in “Sources of Power” where real cops talk about their experiences shooting people / being shot at. It’s not like the movies, even for people who have trained and expected it.

Also, there were armed civilians in attendance when Gabrielle Giffords was shot (duh – Arizona) and they didn’t stop the shooting / shoot the bad guy.

Not to mention the fact that the men who abducted and raped the woman had a gun too, but theirs was out and pointed at her. If she’d had a gun, all she would have done was get herself shot when she tried to pull it out. The guys probably wouldn’t have raped her dead body, but that’s not really an improvement on the outcome.

While it’s horrible what happened to this woman, there are roughly 18-30 sexual assault cases in Orleans parish every month, none of which receive such attention. Some of it is the neighborhood this happened in, some of it is her belonging to a socioeconomic class that has embraced social media, and some of it is probably race. We have the same issue with reporting when it comes to homicides here. I don’t begrudge this woman any help she receives – I simply wish that the rest of the crime victims of my city could be offered the same. A couple months ago seven people were murdered in one day, and it didn’t even make the front page of the (then daily) city paper.

It would be interesting if this funding – beyond the current situation – could be turned into something longer term, a pool of money to help women recover from sexual assaults. For, just as thatbox indicates, this is a horrendously common crime.